LET US SEE HOW ANSIBLE IS SOLVING THE USES CASES OF SEVERAL INDUSTRIES.

what is Ansible ?
Ansible may be a configuration management system written in Python employing a declarative terminology to explain configurations. It is wont to automate software configuration and deployment. Ansible could even be a radically simple IT automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and far of other IT needs.
Designed for multi-tier deployments since day one, Ansible models works thereon infrastructure by describing how all of our systems inter-relate, instead of just managing one system at a time.

Ansible Architecture :

Ansible works by connecting to our nodes and pushing out small programs, called “Ansible modules” to them. These programs are written to be resource models of the desired state of the system. Ansible then executes these modules (over SSH by default), and removes them when finished.

Important Terms in Ansible :

Ansible Playbooks :

Ordered lists of tasks, saved so we can run those tasks in that order repeatedly. Playbooks can include variables as well as tasks. Playbooks are written in YAML and are easy to read, write, share and understand.

Inventory :

A list of managed nodes. An inventory file is also sometimes called a “hostfile”. Our inventory can specify information like IP address for each managed node. An inventory can also organize managed nodes.

Control Node :

Any machine with Ansible installed is known as controller node. we can run Ansible commands and playbooks by invoking the ansible or ansible-playbook command from any control node. we can use any computer that has a Python installation as a control node - laptops, shared desktops, and servers can all run Ansible. However, we cannot use a Windows machine as a control node. we can have multiple control nodes.

Managed Node:

The network devices (and/or servers) we manage with Ansible. Managed nodes are also sometimes called “hosts”. Ansible is not installed on managed nodes.

Tasks: The units of action in Ansible. we can execute a single task once with an ad-hoc command. A task block defines a single procedure to be executed on the server like installing packages.

Modules: These are little programs that act as building blocks encapsulating common tasks such as using yum to install packages or ping to test the connection to a remote host.

Ansible Workflow :

As the services increase, system admins will provision more servers to do configuration management. They need to install Ansible on the master node where they need to write the code into the Ansible playbook to describe the setup, installation process, and the configuration required for these servers.
The local machine connects to these servers (nodes) through an inventory using secured SSH connections.
Once these nodes are connected to the master server, then the node servers are analyzed and the playbook codes are pushed toward each of the servers so that these playbooks can configure the servers remotely, which leads to a consistent environment.

Benefits of Using Ansible :

1. Agentless: As long as a connection can be SSHed and it has Python, it can be configured with Ansible; No agent/software or additional firewall ports are required to install on our client or host systems for automation. Also, we don’t have to worry about setting up and managing the infrastructure.
2. Simple: As we’ve seen, Ansible uses a very simple syntax written in YAML known as playbooks — YAML (Yet Another Markup Language) is a human-readable data serialization language. We don’t need special coding skills to code and understand playbooks. It is very easy to install and execute tasks in order.
3. Modular: Ansible is modular as we require only one program per script. This way, we can spread our programs across different servers.
4. Efficient: Not requiring any extra software on our servers means that there is more space for our resources.
5. Powerful and flexible: Having powerful features gives us the capability to model even complex IT workflows in lesser time, along with managing infrastructure, networks, operating systems, and services that are already in use.

Use cases of Ansible

Now let’s take look on how big companies and industries like NASA ,Narrative and NEC are solving challenges using ansible

NASA :

INCREASING CLOUD EFFICIENCY WITH ANSIBLE AND ANSIBLE TOWER

INDUSTRY : Government

ORGANISATION : The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation’s civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research.

INTEGRATION : Cloud/AWS

USE CASES : Configuration Management

ISSUE: Increase efficiency, cloud migration

CHALLENGE : NASA needed to move roughly 65 applications from a traditional hardware based data center to a cloud-based environment for better agility and cost savings. The rapid timeline resulted in many applications being migrated ‘as-is’ to a cloud environment. This created an environment spanning multiple virtual private clouds (VPCs) and AWS accounts that could not be easily managed. Even simple things, like ensuring every system administrator had access to every server, or simple patching, were extremely burdensome.

SOLUTION : Leverage Ansible Tower to manage and schedule the cloud environment.

RESULTS :As a result of implementing Ansible Tower, NASA is better equipped to manage its AWS environment. Tower allowed NASA to provide better operations and security to its clients. It has also increased efficiency as a team. By the numbers:

• Updating nasa.gov went from over 1 hour to under 5 minutes
• Patching updates went from a multi-day process to 45 minutes
• Achieving near real-time RAM and disk monitoring (accomplished without agents)
• Provisioning OS Accounts across entire environment in under 10 minutes
• Baselining standard AMIs went from 1 hour of manual configuration to becoming an invisible and seamless background process
• Application stack set up from 1–2 hours to under 10 minutes per stack

Narrative :

INDUSTRY : Private (Swedish company Memoto)

ORGANISATION : The Narrative Clip is a tiny, automatic camera and app that gives you a searchable and shareable photographic memory. Narrative continuously shoots photos of the user’s daily life, uploading the photos to the Narrative cloud for storage and organization.

INTEGRATION : Cloud

USE CASES : Configuration Management

ISSUE: Increase efficiency, cloud migration

CHALLENGE : Narrative’s startup business model and hardware-based product necessitated a high degree of automation and hands-off continuous deployment.

WORKING : Narrative is deployed onto application servers running in AWS and managed by Ansible Tower. We use Tower to requisition and provision AWS assets and deploy our application components onto them. We build deb packages for our stack. Tower installs the deb packages in one job template. Then Tower deploys the applications from Git in another job template. We make use of AWS Auto Scale to automatically launch new application server instances. As the instances are launched by AWS, they call back to Ansible Tower to get configured and to pull the latest version of the application.

SOLUTION :We used scripts, which were a single point of failure. We choose Ansible as our first orchestration solution for its simplicity and power.

RESULTS: Ansible Tower has made it much easier to add capacity. We use AWS Auto Scaling. Before Tower, when just using Ansible, we had to turn on a system running Ansible so that the new systems could call back to configure themselves. Tower makes this much easier.

NEC :

NETWORK AUTOMATION AND ENVIRONMENT PROVISIONING FOR IMPROVED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

INDUSTRY : Telecom

ORGANISATION : NEC Corporation of America (NEC) is a leading technology integrator providing solutions that improve the way people work and communicate. Learn more at necam.com

INTEGRATION : Networking

USE CASE : Environment Provisioning

ISSUE : Time to market

CHALLENGE : Recent customer trends towards cloud-based services have forced NEC to quickly move to a hosted unified communications (UC) offer. Challenges around provisioning new clients create excess manual work and human input errors. NEC required a solution to increase the speed to market for new hosted UC customers, while utilizing the current team resources and reducing manual errors.

SOLUTION : NEC has a cloud network for its hosted voice solution and as new customers were being on-boarded, network engineers would enter numerous CLI commands to get them added to their SDN fabric. To speed up this process and reduce manual processes, NEC migrated to using Ansible Tower and new Ansible modules specific to the NEC SDN solution. In this solution, the NEC Programmable Flow Rest API interfaces with Tower to build new customer virtual networks. NEC created Ansible modules for the standard constructs used in building new customer networks. NEC then mapped the new customer CLI scripts into Ansible playbooks. Ansible Tower features such as Surveys were used to create a self service IT experience for the network engineering team.

RESULTS : Using Ansible and Ansible Tower to automate network builds, the NEC network engineering team is able to speed time to market, reduce errors, and add new auditing functionality. Ansible solution benefits:

• Faster time to market for new SaaS customers, resulting in increased revenue
• A predictable deployment process, creating deterministic outcomes and reducing errors from manual work
• Ansible Tower functionality created self service IT, offering a better utilization of team resources
• New functionality to manage the state of configuration, allowing for consistent changes to configurations.

CONCLUSION:

Red Hat Ansible helps organizations scale IT automation, manage complex deployments, and govern automation. It allows users to centralize and control their IT infrastructure with a visual dashboard, role-based access control, playbooks, and analytics to reduce operational complexity. In today’s demand for automation, consistency and the move towards cloud, companies from all sectors are adopting easy-to-use tools that enable them to achieve these goals and overcome complexities.